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The House Sparrow population around our place in Holt has been going like
this for the last ten years at least: Come late August/early September, we
begin to notice groups of between six and c. sixteen birds throughout the day in
budding fruit trees that surround a neighbour's chicken run.
As spring wears on, we see the odd bird acting very wearily as it
ferries tucker to its brood. At least, that's what we think it's doing.
Then, around early March, larger groups, our biggest count from a couple of
years ago was 36, appear rather suddenly, usually of a morning, on power cables
above an expanse of evergreen shrubbery in an adjacent backyard. Sometimes, we
see them emerging from, or diving into the shrubbery. When inspected through
binoculars, the vast majority appear to be young and female birds.
However, based on casual observation, there seemed to be many more House
Sparrows here during the springtimes of the early 1980s. Back then, they
were a darn menace among our emerging spring vegetable
seedlings, particularly lettuce and sweet corn. While they seemed to eat
the former, they appeared to tear the corn seedlings asunder just for kicks,
i.e. avian vandalism, sir and ma'am, that's all it was!
Happily, (I suppose it's happily) the sparrers haven't appeared in
sufficient numbers hereabouts, during the past twenty years, to spoil our crop
of spring seedlings.
John Layton
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